"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 11 - Running from the Deity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

About the Author

Other books by Alan Dean Foster

Copyright Page



ALAN DEAN FOSTER has written in a variety of genres, including hard science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective,
western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Star Wars: The
Approaching Storm, Star Wars, the first three Alien films, and Alien Nation. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest
Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first science fiction work ever to do so. Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, live in
Prescott, Arizona, in a house built of brick that was salvaged from an early-twentieth-century minersтАЩ brothel. He is

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruisw...20Flinx%2011%20-%20Running%20from%20the%20Deity.html (5 of 175)19-2-2006 3:44:41
 Running

currently at work on several new novels and media projects.




1

At first thought, youтАЩd think it would be easy to find a missing planet. Even a methane dwarf. Except
that the missing tenth world of the outlying Imperial AAnn system of Pyrassis was not a world, but an
immense automated weapons platform of the long-extinct race who called themselves the Tar-Aiym.

Actually, Flinx mused as he held out his arms and let the magnetically charged droplets of water swirl
around him and scrub his lanky naked form, one would think it would be even simpler to find a planet-
sized weapons platform than a small planet itself. The only problem was that in the absence of standing
orders to guide its revived behavior, the monstrous ancient device had gone looking for some. Since to
the best of current knowledge the last of those beings who might be capable of issuing such directives
had died half a million years earlier, more or less, the prospects of said intelligent weapons platform
stumbling across relevant instructions on how it ought to proceed were slight indeed. Flinx suspected
that it would do no good, should he somehow actually succeed in tracking down his galactically
perambulating quarry, to point out that the species it was built to fight, the HurтАЩrikku, were as dead and
gone as the massive machineтАЩs original Tar-Aiym builders.

Find it first, he told himself as he did a slow turn beneath the recycled spray from the shower. Semantics
follow function.

He did not need to pivot for purposes of cleanliness since the water beads automatically enveloped him
in their attentive aqueous embrace. They avoided only the special shower mask that shielded his mouth
and nose. Without such a mask, someone making use of such a shower conceivably could drownтАФ
though it was an easy enough matter simply to step sideways and clear of the open-sided, freestanding